18 Beware of outsourcing your company's social media output

Channelling social media through websites like YouTube can offer your company a larger audience but much less control, says an industry expert.

Businesses that outsource their social media output are opening themselves up to the possibility of losing a great deal of control, says an industry analyst.

For instance, by channelling videos onto your site through a service such as YouTube you can potentially reach a much greater audience, but it comes at a price, claims Jakob Nielsen in his Alertbox blog on useit.com.

He notes that the risk involved in using a social media site is that you lose control over the way your media is presented, which can often end up looking amateurish if they appear in an illogical order.

"These arguments count in favour of keeping social features on your own site where you can design them to provide a better user experience for your customers," he concludes.

Mr Nielsen points out that the needs of your own website will usually differ greatly from what a social media site is aiming to achieve and usability will suffer if this difference is too pronounced.

In an Alertbox post last month, he advised that the key to using Twitter effectively is to be as concise as possible and focus on a separate point in each tweet.

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